Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “That is,” Stacy went on, “if we believed the analytic in the first place.”

  “Which intelligence made this report?” Callie pressed.

  “One of the Little Brothers, actually. It was, oh, three weeks out of the box and not yet fully plugged into the real world.”

  “Then why are you presenting its observations in council?”

  “Because …” This was the tricky part. “It raises the question of whether the commissars at the Chinese cantonment actually think they can bring in such a weapon—and not get caught.”

  “Well, can they?”

  “I doubt it,” Stacy said. “I’ve questioned the Big Brothers, and they seem not too concerned. One of them dismissed the whole matter as fragments of information the Little Brother has confused with a training exercise.”

  Callie pursed her lips and nodded. “Yes, I would tend to agree. Things have been quiet lately. I don’t see the current situation—either foreign or domestic—as generating that much hostility.”

  It was time to apply just the right amount of psychological pressure. “In normal circumstances, that would be the end of it,” Stacy said slowly. “Except … what about the bomb that nearly took out Great-Grandfather’s transport? Do we really believe it was just some antique, buried in the road years ago?”

  She looked up at the Patriarch, who sat at the head of the table, and found he was staring back at her. She had certainly caught his attention—as intended. Without shifting her gaze, Stacy tried to determine whether her great-aunt had also noticed his focus.

  Knock, knock, came the buzz in her mind.

  Stacy glanced toward the military end of the table, where Jay-Jay sat beside his father Paul. Her cousin had his head down, studying his fingers.

  Not now, she sent.

  Knock, knock, he repeated.

  Okay, who’s there?

  Noah.

  Noah who?

  Do you Noah all this for a fact?

  What do you think? This is phase two. Now shut up.

  Great-Grandfather John cleared his throat. “Maybe things have been too quiet up there,” he said.

  Bingo! Stacy thought, then controlled this thought before it leaked out.

  “Sir?” she asked. “That might just mean the détente is working.”

  “Or maybe that the People’s Republic”—the old name for Greater China, from his own time—“is now moving forward with some hidden phase two of their incursion.”

  The Patriarch’s use of that phrase, phase two, the one she had just exchanged with Jay-Jay, sent a chill up her spine. The old man certainly didn’t have a cortical cut—so could he actually be psychic?

  “Yes, sir,” she said quickly. “And I intend to keep an eye on the situation.”

  “Please, see that you do. And keep us all informed.” Then he nodded for Callie to bring up the next item.

  3. The Truth That Lies Within

  The software cartridge was a birthday gift from John Praxis’s granddaughter in Houston, Jacquie Wildmon. The attached message read: “Enjoy this in the privacy of your study, Grandfather.”

  “What do you suppose it does?” he asked Callie.

  “Why don’t you try it and find out?” she said with grin. “And if the show’s any good, send me a copy.”

  That evening, behind closed doors, he loaded the code into his desktop and sat back, prepared for anything. A face came up on his comm wall. It was not a human face, exactly, but more like a mask made of white clay, with empty slits for eyes and a gash with stylized lips for a mouth. The background field of wavering, ice-blue flames showed clearly through the openings. It reminded him of a very old image, from a storybook or a movie somewhere, something he’d seen in his youth.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I am the Magic Mirror of your mind,” the mask replied with a pert little nod.

  “Really,” Praxis said drily, suspecting an elaborate joke. “What do you do?”

  “I help you see clearly the truth that lies within. I help you understand your past, your present, your feelings, your dreams … even, to some extent, your future.”

  “So you’re a robot psychologist.”

  The mask frowned. “That is one interpretation of my function.”

  “I’ve heard about those. They’re supposed to be a joke.”

  “I am a new, more advanced model, using Projective Imagination.” As it spoke, the two words flashed briefly on the screen, accompanied by a registered trademark symbol. “I am not a joke.” The mask paused. “I am, however, a beta package, subject to recall and revision. If you would please agree to the following terms and conditions …” A paragraph of printed legalese scrolled up the screen from the bottom, followed by still more paragraphs. It was an old-fashioned end-user license, such as artificial intelligences had not spoken or displayed for many years. It must have been part of the software’s beta status.

  “You can stop this anytime,” the mask hinted, “by saying, ‘I accept.’ ”

  “I accept,” Praxis replied with a grin. “So … do you have a name?”

  “You may call me whatever you wish. That is part of my process.”

  “Fine. Then from now on you answer to the name ‘Shrink.’ ”

  “Ah.” The face nodded. “I can sense hostility in that.”

  “Good. I meant you to. So how do we begin?”

  “You tell me what’s on your mind, what’s bothering you.”

  “You mean, aside from the fact that people are still trying to kill me?”

  “Who is it that’s trying to kill you?” the program parroted back.

  “Well, who isn’t? No, skip that. Occupational hazard these days.” Then Praxis himself paused. He sat for a moment, tapping his fingertips on the desk’s surface: one-one, one-two, one-three, one-four, and over again.

  “Talking to me makes you nervous.”

  “Not at all. I’m just bored, actually.”

  “You don’t like talking to people, do you?”

  “No, I like people just fine,” Praxis said.

  “But not everyone.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Some more than others.”

  “That’s true for everyone, I think.”

  “You were married once, to a woman named Adele.”

  “Did you get that from the public records?” Praxis asked, then wondered what records might have survived from so many years ago.

  “I have many resources,” the mask said mysteriously.

  Of course! Jacquie preprogrammed it with his personal history.

  “And you remained faithful to Adele,” Shrink suggested.

  “I don’t know how you—or Jacquie—would know that.”

  “Ah! Then did you not remain faithful to Adele?”

  “Oh, yeah. Faithful, like an old dog,” he agreed.

  “But you sometimes wanted to cheat, didn’t you?”

  “Once, toward the end. When Adele was dying.”

  “Did this object of your affections have a name?”

  “Don’t you know? Didn’t Jacquie tell you?”

  “I will know more if you tell me yourself.”

  “It was Antigone, the woman lawyer who sued us. She started the landslide, I think, that brought down the company.”

  “Did you fall in love with her because of that?”

  “No, not at first. Only later. She was so beautiful, so poised and haughty. Do people use that word anymore? ‘Haughty’? She was so smart and capable in so many ways, and yet … so vulnerable. Rigid but fragile. Like a piece of fine china.”

  “But you waited until Adele had died,” Shrink said. It was not a question. “Before you became … physically demonstrative with her.”

  “I waited ten years and more. We lost track of one another during the war—the Civil War, that is. The Second Civil War. And then we found ourselves at the same regeneration clinic, a thousand miles away from home. It just seemed like fate.”

  “You don’t
believe in fate, John Praxis.”

  “No, you’re right,” he said. “I don’t.”

  “And you’ve had no one since Antigone.”

  “How in the hell would you know that?”

  “You are a faithful man,” Shrink said.

  “She was the love of my life,” Praxis found himself saying. “Adele was, in many ways, only a placeholder. Oh, the mother of my children, to be sure, and my life’s companion. But she was not … Antigone.”

  “How did it end, your relationship with Antigone?”

  “Something happened to her face, and she stopped being beautiful.”

  “And so you lost interest in her? You are not such a shallow man.”

  “No, of course not. She was embarrassed. Mortified. It was she who lost interest … in living, I think. She went away to stay with her sister in Oklahoma.”

  “And you never saw her again.”

  “No, she eventually came back to live and practice law in San Francisco. I got glimpses of her, from time to time. We had a son, once, by artificial inception. And I believe she has had at least one daughter with me, by the same means, since then. I helped Antigone and her sister through the Hunger Winter, and over the years she’s done occasional work for the family. She even took on my great-grandson Kenny as a legal protégé.”

  “So you and Antigone are now colleagues,” Shrink suggested. “But not lovers.”

  “That’s by her choice. Not mine. I would make a home for her.”

  “Even though she is no longer beautiful.”

  “She was once—beautiful—and she remains so in my heart.”

  “But you are looking at her, at your relationship, from the perspective of many years ago. Your feeling of love is a thing now distant and distorted. You long for a memory, John Praxis. You want someone who was once your equal, and who could now share your sense of time and place, of history, in this increasingly strange new world you inhabit. Even though she has hurt you, you want her because she is familiar and comforting.”

  “ ‘Comforting’! You don’t know the woman, Shrink,” he said. “She has always chosen others over me. First her sister Helen. Then the daughter she created, Angela. She clings to them. Helen died recently, but she keeps the girl close beside her. Antigone totally dominates her. My god, Angela is almost thirty now, and Antigone still treats her like a little girl. That can’t be healthy, can it?”

  “You feel an attachment to this Angela?”

  “Only because she’s carrying my genes.”

  “You want her to be fulfilled and happy?”

  “Yes. She ought to have a life of her own, too.”

  “Which would only happen away from Antigone?”

  “Well, yes,” Praxis replied. “That follows—”

  “Do you know the secret to being young?”

  “I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “Life is an adventure, John Praxis. Look ahead to the next adventure. To do that, you must reinvent yourself, your mind, your outlook, as others are surgically reinventing your body. Antigone clings to the past, to her attachments, to her false relationship with this young woman. She is rigid and inflexible because she is scared. You must put her aside and find your own romantic adventure. You must look forward to the woman who comes next.”

  “Now you’re talking like a matchbook cover.”

  “You mean—ah! A paid advertisement, a come-on.”

  “Something like that. You’re programming’s showing.”

  “I’m trying to suggest a way for you to avoid trouble, John.”

  “Sure you are.” And he abruptly switched off the program.

  He had just thought of a way to lure Antigone back to him.

  * * *

  Kenny Praxis submitted to thermal and ultrasonic inspection by the doorman at the tower apartments in the exclusive Rincon Hill neighborhood. While the automaton looked for weapons or contraband with its exosensors, its cameras took the biometrics of his face, confirmed his identity, and performed a soft probe of his cortical array to glean the purpose of his visit. To help with that, he squinted slightly and concentrated on the appointment he had with Antigone Wells for that afternoon along with its stated purpose.

  Although Antigone no longer did much work for the family, and Kenny’s practice was almost exclusively oriented on family business these days, they still needed to confer occasionally on old cases. One of them had just come up, the appeal of a Defense Force retainer on a manslaughter conviction up in the Redding Autonomous Community. Antigone wanted his amplified memory to help interpret her case notes.

  “Proceed, please,” the mechanical attendant said, unlocking the door.

  “Thank you,” he replied—an old habit with people and machines alike.

  Knowing of the Patriarch’s old affection for Antigone, the family had tried to keep her, her late sister, and her niece within its sphere of protection after Antigone moved out of Fort Apache in Fremont. That doorman, for instance, had several tweaks and hidden weapons provided free of charge from Uncle Paul’s armory. The building had its own Little Brother, and the roof supported anomalous structures, designed to look like air-conditioning vents, that hid three anti-aircraft Spanglers that launched guided projectiles by rail-gun. Apartments on the forty-eighth floor on either side of Antigone’s mounted two more Spanglers behind their glass curtain walls, as well as Rovers who could take command of the entire floor. Antigone was thoroughly protected without being forced to sense, know about, or acknowledge their presence.

  When he buzzed the door to her apartment, it was opened by Antigone’s niece Angela. Her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was wearing a shiny pink leotard with silvery tights and ballet slippers. Her favorite piece of jewelry, the silver chain with a heart pendant, disappeared into the scoop-neck front of her leotard, where it retained a visible outline between her breasts. He had obviously interrupted her workout, because her face and hairline were damp. Angela’s agate-green eyes flashed as she recognized him.

  “Oh, hi, Uncle Ken!” she said breathlessly. “My aunt is in her study.”

  The girl led him down the hallway, and Kenny couldn’t help noticing the way she moved—light on her feet and lithe, like a dancer, rather than the flat-footed waddle some women assumed when they weren’t wearing high heels. He also noticed her square shoulders, the angular points of her hips, and the tight double-curve of her backside outlined in pink spandex.

  She turned suddenly, at the door to Antigone’s office, and caught him staring. Her eyebrows went up, but she had a smile of amusement on her lips. Then she turned her head to the side, toward the open door. “Ken Praxis is here, Aunt,” she announced. As she spoke, her eyes flicked back toward him. She was still smiling.

  “Send him in,” Antigone called.

  The girl stood aside—a dancer’s movement of front foot to back foot—and let him pass. She was still smiling.

  He and Antigone got right down to work, going over their notes from the soldier’s trial four years earlier and their arguments and exhibits at the time. Kenny used his cortical array to pull up precedents from the online legal intelligences, and Antigone used quick, virtual keystrokes on her desktop to pull up others on her comm wall. Even without a cut, she was still the master of case law. Within ten minutes they were hip deep in a projected strategy for the appeal—but his mind really was not fully focused. He was still seeing Angela in her leotard, the flick of her eyes, and her smile.

  Kenny had known Angela since he was a teenager, back when she had been a toddler. He had watched her grow up in Antigone Wells’s home. When he took his entrance exams at Berkeley on Antigone’s kitchen table, the little girl sat across from him with a coloring book. A few years later, when he studied his law books at that same table, Angela did her homework in algebra and geometry. Over the years, she had been like a baby sister to him, and he had watched her fat little face develop elfin cheekbones and a pointed chin. Their relationship had always been easy and not
at all self-conscious. He had noticed, of course, when she grew a woman’s body. But he didn’t think of it, because she was still just Angie.

  Now he thought about it.

  Angela Wells had become a quiet, almost reclusive woman. At twenty-nine, she was more beautiful than she had ever been. But he had always thought of her as a kind of novitiate to Antigone’s reverend mother, in the secular nunnery they maintained together. He had not imagined she would be anything else but a shy little girl—until that flick of the eyes and the amused smile.

  At the end of the hour, after he and Antigone had structured their appeal and sent it off, he left the attorney in her office and made his way back up the hallway. Angela came out of a side door, dressed now in a white cotton blouse and dark-blue denim skirt, with her hair loose around her ears. She still wore the ballet slippers, though, and she still moved like a dancer.

  “Oh, are you going?” she asked.

  “Yes, we’re done now.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Look—”

  He didn’t want this to become awkward, but he was feeling awkward. How do you change the polarity on a relationship that had grown up over twenty years and more to be one thing, and now you wanted it to become something else? Besides, he was almost sure Antigone would object. Not to him personally, because Kenny knew the older woman liked and respected him. But for Angela herself, because Antigone and her niece had some kind of closed, possessive relationship that he could sense but did not fully understand. He just knew deep down that Antigone would meet any approach to the girl—to the young woman now—with latent, if not open, hostility.